What a great Wily it’s been, and for those of you who live on the latest release and haven’t already updated, the bits are baked and looking great. You can jump the queue if you know where to look while we spin up the extra servers needed for IMG and ISO downloads 🙂

Utopic, Vivid and Wily have been three intense releases, packed with innovation, and now we intend to bring all of those threads together for our Long Term Support release due out in April 2016.

LXD is the world’s fastest hypervisor, led by Canonical, a pure-container way to run Linux guests on Linux hosts. If you haven’t yet played with LXD (a.k.a LXC 2.0-b1) it will blow you away. It will certainly transform your expectations of virtualisation, from slow-and-hard to amazingly light and fast. Imagine getting a full machine running any Linux you like, as a container on your laptop, in less than a second. For me, personally, it has become a fun way to clean up my build processes, spinning up a container on demand to make sure I always build in a fresh filesystem.

Snappy Packaging System

Snappy is the world’s most secure packaging system, delivering crisp and transaction updates with rollback for both applications and the system, from phone to appliance. We’re using snappy on high-end switches and flying wonder-machines, on raspberry pi’s and massive clouds. Ubuntu Core is the all-snappy minimal server, and Ubuntu Personal will be the all-snappy phone / tablet / pc. With a snap you get to publish exactly the software you want to your device, and update it instantly over the air, just like we do the Ubuntu Phone. Snappy packages are automatically confined to ensure that a bug in one app doesn’t put your data elsewhere at risk. Amazing work, amazing team, amazing community!

Metal as a Service

MAAS is your physical cloud, with bare-metal machines on demand, supporting Ubuntu, CentOS and Windows. Drive your data centre from a single dashboard, bond network interfaces, raid your disks and rock the cloud generation. Led by Canonical, loved by the world leaders of big, and really big, deployments. MAAS gives you high availability DNS, DHCP, PXE and other critical infrastructure, for huge and dynamic data centres. Also pretty fun to run at home.

Juju is… model-driven application orchestration, that lets communities define how big topological apps like Hadoop and OpenStack map onto the cloud of your choice. The fastest way to find the fastest way to spin those applications into the cloud you prefer. With traditional configuration managers like Puppet now also saying that model-driven approaches are the way to the future, I’m very excited to see the kinds of problems that huge enterprises are starting to solve with Juju, and equally excited to see start-ups using Juju to speed their path to adoption. Here’s the Hadoop, Spark, IPython Notebook coolness I deployed live on stage at Apache Hadoopcon this month:

Apache Hadoop, Spark, IPython modelled with Juju

All of these are coming together beautifully, making Ubuntu the fastest path to magic of all sorts. And that magic will go by the codename… xenial xerus!

What fortunate timing that our next LTS should be X, because “xenial” means “friendly relations between hosts and guests”, and given all the amazing work going into LXD and KVM for Ubuntu OpenStack, and beyond that the interoperability of Ubuntu OpenStack with hypervisors of all sorts, it seems like a perfect fit.

And Xerus, the African ground squirrels, are among the most social animals in my home country. They thrive in the desert, they live in small, agile, social groups that get along unusually well with their neighbours (for most mammals, neighbours are a source of bloody competition, for Xerus, hey, collaboration is cool). They are fast, feisty, friendly and known for their enormous… courage. That sounds just about right. With great… courage… comes great opportunity!

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I saw ubuntu edge indiegogo campaign passed and now I see next LTS is focused mostly on server & cloud.
I completely understand and agree.
But, with 4 days with Ubuntu Touch with BQ Aquaris 4.5 phone, I really like it.
Actually, I didn’t know who Ubuntu theme was beautiful until I saw it in small phone screen.
(I know it is strange. But, it feels much more clear and crisp.)
It could be only when you focus more on server and cloud, people just realized the power and freedom of full linux distro in one’s hand. Very irony.
Personally, I hope Ubuntu succeed in both space.
Client(PC, Phone, Tablet, TV) & Server(including cloud)
Cheers

I was very excited 14.04 LTS release on servers. Docker and Node.js got both very mature and production ready for that release. Now I’m in the same way excited snappy applications for desktop

However, I’m concerned about how 16.04 LTS fits to current desktop requirements. Recently, the consumer authority updated its policy on the how long personal computers must last on normal, daily use, including software. Before, it was ok if machine was working minimum of two years after purchase.

Now vendor is accountable if it breaks on two years after purchase AND + two years it should be able to repair back to working condition at a reasonable price. What this means is that current development cycle of Ubuntu, where is LTS releases and those intermediate releases, may be outdated. To fullfil requirements on consumer tech, there should be at minimum four year stable kernel branch in Ubuntu computers at time of sale, or some way to ensure that kernel upgrades to new releases don’t break hardware compatibility.

When compared to others, this is easy to Apple because it has limited amount of hardware. At this point it looks like Microsoft choose to provide long term stable kernels to Windows 10.

I think it should be considered to make LTS kernel supported five years + release cycle to fullfil requirements.

However, this is not the case on stuff top of kernel. I think it is perfectly acceptable to update applications and not keep them stable, as long as features are clearly marked “deprecated” minimum of two years before removed, just to save maintenance efforts. This kind of policy may apply some API’s too. To save maintenance efforts more, three year cycle may be optimal to todays requirements.

Snappy might bring some help to fullfil this “two year working, four year able to fix easily after purchace” -requirement?